Search Me!

Analyze Me!

April 11, 2009

FT: How a football tragedy redeemed the game

How a football tragedy redeemed the game

By Simon Kuper

Published: April 10 2009 14:36 | Last updated: April 10 2009 14:36

On
Sunday April 16 1989, thousands of people packed Liverpool’s cathedral
and the plaza outside for a requiem mass. Overnight, a nun had made a
large “Liverpool FC” banner, and it hung by the altar. The previous
day, 95 Liverpool fans had been crushed to death at Hillsborough
football stadium in Sheffield.

As the crowd waited, wrote the
sociologist Tony Walter (in his 1991 essay “The Mourning After
Hillsborough”), “one lad haltingly darted to the front” and laid a
piece of football regalia beneath the nun’s banner. Soon, people were
queueing to do likewise. Bruce Grobbelaar, Liverpool’s then-goalkeeper
and team clown, read the lesson in a shaking voice. A lone choirboy
sang the club’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

It
was one of the scenes – along with the million visitors in the
following week who turned Liverpool’s Anfield stadium into a fragrant
floral shrine – that began to redeem football. Before the Hillsborough
disaster, football fans had been treated as a menace to English
community. After Hillsborough, it became apparent that fans create much
of English community.

The FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool
and Nottingham Forest kicked off at Hillsborough (all FA cup
semi-finals are played at neutral grounds). The game was to end in the
sixth minute.

What happened at Hillsborough that afternoon
became something more than a game or a disaster. It was a turning
point. “The game that changed [the nation/sport/world]” is now a
commonly used subtitle for sports books but it applies indisputably to
this one. At its most fundamental level, Hillsborough remains a human
disaster. It changed the lives of the people who lost family and
friends that day, such as Trevor Hicks, who travelled to Hillsborough
with his daughters Vicki, 15, and Sarah, 19, and went home without
them. Hicks later became chairman of the Hillsborough Families Support
Group.

And that day changed British stadiums: the crumbling
fenced-in terraces where Hicks’s girls died have been replaced by
arenas as prestigious as opera houses or cathedrals. That change has
sparked an ongoing, anguished debate about what sort of nation England
is: authentically working-class, or rootlessly middle-class. Most of
all, though, Hillsborough’s aftermath gave football an honoured place
in English life.

“Hillsborough”, as it’s become known in disaster shorthand, was probably inevitable. It
was British football’s fourth major fatal crowd disaster since the war.
(Four years earlier, in 1985, a fire at Bradford City’s stadium had
killed 56 people.) The disaster of 1989 happened because British
stadiums were decrepit, and British police were obsessed with
hooligans. Liverpool’s visiting supporters at Hillsborough were treated
as monsters to be controlled, herded through an underground tunnel into
pens behind one goal. A terrible crush developed in the pens before
kick-off; and then police opened two gates to let other fans waiting
outside the ground in en masse. People in the pens began to die. Many
were crushed into the fence that barred them from the pitch. They
begged policemen to open the gates and let them on to the field. The
police, still on guard against hooligans, refused. In fact, when the
crush forced open an emergency gate at the front of the pen, a
policeman shut it. Fans turned blue, became incontinent, vomited, died,
while policemen shouted at them to “push back”. Bodies – many of them
children – began piling up. Meanwhile the football continued before
being abandoned at 3.06pm.

Finally, some policemen helped fans
pull holes in the fence with their bare hands. Grief-stricken
supporters, narrowly saved from death themselves, surged on to the
pitch. The football writer David Conn says in his 1997 book The Football Business: Fair Game in the ’90s? (Mainstream):
“This brought about that eternal, shameful image of Hillsborough, of
football at the time, the line of police officers pushing the Liverpool
fans back, then standing on the halfway line doing nothing, as people
died in front of them.”

The horrors continued. Inside the ground, writes Nick Varley in Parklife
(Penguin, 1999), another book about football’s transformation in the
years after Hillsborough, “there was a ripple of applause as a man
lying prone on the pitch responded to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with
a twitch of his feet. It died as he did.” Much of the nation watched
all this unfold live on the BBC. Now the nation had to respond.

Four
days after Hillsborough, The Sun newspaper infamously labelled
Liverpool’s fans “animals”, and falsely blamed the disaster on drunken
hooligans. However, what’s now forgotten is that in the days after the
disaster, much of the British media and establishment blamed the fans,
too. The novelist Anthony Burgess, writing in The Daily Telegraph,
called crowds “primitive beasts”, and complained: “For many thousands
of Britons there is nothing more important on a Saturday afternoon than
watching 22 men kicking a piece of leather about. There is something
wrong with our culture if we have come to this.” Auberon Waugh, in The
Sunday Telegraph eight days after the disaster, wrote – wrongly – of
supporters “rioting outside the gate” before kick-off. As for the prime
minister, “Margaret Thatcher regarded football supporters as the enemy
within,” said one of her few football-loving ministers, Kenneth Clarke,
years later.

In the 1980s, hooligans were an embarrassment to
Thatcher’s rhetoric of law and order. To use the vocabulary of the
sociologist Stanley Cohen, from his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics
(Routledge), they were the British “folk devils” of the era, the feared
equivalents of mods and rockers in the 1960s or Islamic fundamentalists
today.

But within days of Hillsborough, the image of the fan had
changed. That change began in Liverpool. Thatcher had said in 1987,
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women,
and there are families.” Liverpool’s response to Hillsborough
demonstrated that this city was a society, and more than that, a
society held together largely by football. The run-down port town with
its Irish-Catholic heritage had always felt slightly apart from the
rest of Britain, wrote Walter. Now it banded together. Liverpool’s
players attended funerals, counselled the bereaved, became ordinary
Liverpudlians like everyone else.

Two local taxi drivers, one
of whom supported Liverpool, the other their local rivals Everton,
organised a “chain of scarves” knotted together symbolically along the
mile that separated Liverpool’s ground from Everton’s. A week after the
disaster, at 3.06pm precisely, Liverpool’s city centre – and those of
Sheffield and Nottingham – fell silent as shoppers stood and mourned
the dead. When Liverpool played Everton at Anfield soon afterwards, the
home fans at the famous Kop end of the stadium held up a banner that
said, “The Kop thanks you. We never walked alone.”

Hillsborough
happened in a Britain already reeling from three major disasters within
two years, all caused by lax safety procedures or decaying
infrastructure, or both. First was the capsizing of the Herald of Free
Enterprise car ferry in the English Channel (193 dead, March 1987),
then the fire at King’s Cross underground station (31 dead, November
1987) and the explosion of the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea
(167 dead, July 1988). Yet none of these prompted equivalent communal
rituals.

The mourning after “Hillsborough” showed that British
football wasn’t a socially dysfunctional entertainment for stupid
people. It could also be a beautiful, sustaining thing. It could give
people a community.

Twenty years on, football’s social meaning is now widely understood. Nearly
25m people watch the English national team’s biggest games on TV, about
three times as many as see the Queen’s Christmas Day speech. In most
European countries, the most popular TV programmes – often the biggest
communal events of any kind – are football matches. As I discovered
when researching my forthcoming book, Why England Lose, suicide
rates in European countries fall when a country’s national team plays
in a world cup or European championship. But back in 1989, the game’s
impact was scarcely understood.

On the Monday after the
disaster, the government asked Peter Taylor, a judge in the court of
appeal, to write a report on stadiums. The judge, who had stood on the
terraces at Newcastle United as a boy, wanted to save football, not to
bury it. Above all, he wanted the police to stop locking up fans like
“prisoners of war”. Determined not to let a crisis go to waste, he
recommended that fences and standing terraces be scrapped. Grounds had
to become all-seater.

The clubs had intended to keep
receiving customers in run-down Victorian sheds. Forced to renovate,
they discovered that customers preferred comfort. In the season of
Hillsborough, fewer than 20m people had attended English professional
matches. By 2006/07 about 30m went, in spite of much higher ticket
prices, far more matches being shown live on TV and many new forms of
entertainment.

It’s often said that football became
fashionable in the 1990s. It’s more accurate to say that it became
safe. It wasn’t merely that British stadiums improved – though jointly
with German grounds they are now the best in football – but football
policing was also transformed. British police forces recognised that
hooliganism was a sideshow. Hooligans looked spectacular on television
but crushes, not thugs, have killed well over 1,000 spectators around
the world; another 19 people in Abidjan just a fortnight ago.

The
death of 39 Juventus fans at the Heysel stadium in Brussels in 1985 is
commonly attributed to hooligans, and the Italians were indeed fleeing
attacks from opposing Liverpool fans. However, the 39 died only because
a side-wall in the crumbling stadium collapsed beneath the weight of
escaping supporters, causing a fatal crush.

Stadium
officials used to focus on repressing hooligans. In the mid-1980s some
British matches featured as many as 75 policemen per 1,000 fans. Today,
says a Scotland Yard detective who works on football, many clubs no
longer need any policemen. “If anything happens, they can just dial
999.”

Yet the game’s rebound has prompted widespread
disquiet. Higher ticket prices, greater comfort, even better food, have
all attracted a new middle-class audience to the “working man’s
ballet”. As Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch (Penguin), the
groundbreaking memoir of life as a football fan, later noted, the
picture is of “a lot of horrible pretentious middle-class gits
descending on our football grounds and elbowing out the true
salt-of-the-earth cloth cap fan”.

But the grumblers are missing
the point. Many middle-class people have always loved football. A month
after Hillsborough, when Liverpool played Arsenal in a match that would
decide that year’s English title, the common room at my university was
packed to bursting. In spite of their class, most had been following
the “working man’s ballet” since childhood.

So it wasn’t that the middle classes snatched football away
from the working classes. Rather, since 1945 Britain had become ever
more middle-class, measured by education and income. At the time of
Hillsborough, about 15 per cent of Britons entered higher education.
Just five years later, the figure was 30 per cent. Real incomes have
trebled between the early 1960s and today, according to figures from UK
National Statistics. As a consequence, large numbers of British people
who were born into the traditional working class later left it. For
many, it was a traumatic uprooting.

The remaking of football
stadiums – highly visible British gathering-places – has exemplified
the national shift in class. Hence the many laments for the lost
cloth-capped proletarian crowds. Many Britons are simply mourning their
lost roots.

The final death toll for Hillsborough was 96 (one man
died four years later, having been in a coma). This Wednesday at
3.06pm, 20 years to the minute after “Hillsborough”, Liverpool will
stop again. The city’s bells will chime 96 times for the victims of
Victorian stadiums and authoritarian policing. For two minutes of
silence, Liverpool will become a community. Football can do that, in
terrible times and, more usually nowadays, in good times too. The new
community is different from the old one. It features fewer cloth caps,
and many more women and non-white people. But it does show that
Thatcher was mistaken: there is such a thing as society.

Simon Kuper is author of ‘Football Against the Enemy’ (Orion, £7.99) and is a columnist for the FT

.......................................

Football’s growing fortune – and fans

●
In the 1988-89 football season, the top English clubs played in what
was then known as Division One. (It became the Premier League in 1992).
Eleven of the 20 top-flight clubs in 1989 are no longer in the
Premiership, among them Luton Town, Sheffield Wednesday, Nottingham
Forest and QPR.

The 1989 league champions, Arsenal, and runners-up, Liverpool, are still among the country’s strongest teams.

● A total of 7.8m people attended
English top division football matches in the 1988-89 season. By last
season, this had risen to 13.8m.

● Deloitte published the first of
its annual surveys of football clubs’ finances in 1992. Then, Tottenham
Hotspur had the highest turnover (£18.2m), followed by Manchester
United (£17.8m). Notts County, with a turnover of just £1.9m, were in
Division One.

Twelve of the 22 top division clubs made a
profit, compared with just five of 20 Premiership clubs in 2006-2007.
Between them, the former Division One clubs had revenues of £170m in
1992. The revenue of the combined Premier League clubs in 2007/8 is
projected at £1.9bn.

● In
Deloitte’s 2009 Football Money League survey, Real Madrid is ranked
first in the world, with revenues of £289.6m (2007/8). Manchester
United is second (£257.1m). The other English clubs in the top 10 are
Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. Tottenham Hotspur, the richest club in
1992, is now in 14th position (£114.8m).

●
In the mid-1980s, ticket prices in the English First Division were
around £2.50. Today, in the Premier League, they are nearer £30. That
implies a growth rate of around 11.5 per cent a year for nearly quarter
of a century, far above inflation.

● In
1988/1989, English clubs were still banned from European competitions
because of the violence by Liverpool fans at the European cup final in
Brussels in 1985. Today, four of the eight quarter-finalists in this
season’s Champions League are English teams.

Sources: Deloitte, FT.com, Rothmans Book of Football Records, Soccernet, Football365.com, Cass Business School

The
“last game” of this book’s title took place on May 26 1989, when
Arsenal played Liverpool at their Anfield stadium for the final match
of the English football season. Arsenal needed to win 2-0 to deprive
their illustrious opponents of another league title and win the
championship themselves. In a dramatic finish to the season, the north
Londoners won 2-0, scoring their decisive goal with practically the
last kick of the game.

Jason Cowley wasn’t at Anfield. He had a
ticket for the original fixture but that was before history changed
course six weeks earlier at Hillsborough stadium, where 96 Liverpool
fans were crushed to death on the terraces. After a two-week
suspension, the season carried on. The match between Liverpool and
Arsenal was rescheduled as its final act.

Cowley had university
final exams and couldn’t make the rearranged date. But he felt the
significance of his team’s victory immediately. Now an experienced
journalist and editor of the New Statesman, he explores the idea of the
match itself as a symbol. Not just the last game of an extraordinary
season, but the last game of football as it had come to be seen by the
establishment – a decrepit working-class pastime watched by hooligans.
A world away from today’s cosmopolitan circus of overpaid players,
overpriced tickets and oligarch owners.

He resets the scene,
describing the young Arsenal team that stood on the brink of greatness
– or disappointment – and evoking Anfield’s famous terrace, the Kop,
which in the post-Hillsborough switch to all-seater stadiums would lose
some of its awesome, swaying humanity. On the horrors of Hillsborough,
Cowley is sensitive, though a little brief given that this was the
incident that ultimately ushered in the end of an era.

The
May 26 game itself forms the book’s centrepiece and Cowley provides a
textured account of how the day’s events unfolded, detailing everything
from the Arsenal players’ afternoon naps to their conflicting accounts
of which north London nightclub they visited on their victorious return
home.

Cowley plays this section straight, perhaps
conscious that he didn’t personally witness the match, and aware that
Nick Hornby’s 1992 novel Fever Pitch
cornered the market in Arsenal fans’ memoirs. It is a pity though that
he doesn’t incorporate the memories of some of those fans who were
present at Anfield that night.

After the main event, the
narrative widens. Was a new kind of football on the way? Cowley
identifies the cultural forces that started to transform public
perception of the game, from rave culture’s mellowing effect on the
fans, to New Order’s hip England World Cup anthem a year later. He
neatly skirts the issue of the World Cup itself, in which England’s
heroic near-miss and Gazza’s tears arguably provided a more literal
watershed moment than the game at Anfield. By the 1996 European
Championships, the whole country appears to be singing “football’s
coming home”.

However, it is in this section that the book’s
often uncomfortable attempt to juggle memoir and analysis takes its
toll. Cowley wanders between reflections on the game as it is now (“too
detached from its old class and cultural associations, its regional
specificities”) and updates on the torpor he fell into after
graduating. It takes the death of his father, who introduced him to
football as a boy, to imbue a sense of purpose and kick off his career
as a writer.

Almost 20 years after the “last game”, Cowley attends a function at Arsenal’s giant new
Emirates stadium. The guest of honour is Michael Thomas, scorer of that
immortal second goal. Cowley is at a table with someone who has named
his two sons Mickey and Thomas. The real Mickey Thomas is asked, as he
has been most days since May 1989, to explain how he felt when he was
through on goal in the final minute. “Surreal” is his slightly
overwhelmed response. For him, as for football, things have never quite
been the same since.